Since Pluto is no longer a planet, NASA should turn the spacecraft around and aim it at Neptune instead.you fell for it, didn't you?Seriously, we shouldn't be wasting that much money going to a non-planet.

Juno was doing a close flyby of Earth to get a gravitational boost on its way to Jupiter, and as a kind of test of the sensitivity of the receiver, as well as a nifty public relations stunt, it was arranged to have a website to tell hams when to "key down" their transceivers so that they were all transmitting at the same time. Each "dit" lasted 30 seconds, and the entire sequence took 6.5 minutes to complete, just to send 2 letters.

dittybopper:Since Pluto is no longer a planet, NASA should turn the spacecraft around and aim it at Neptune instead.you fell for it, didn't you?Seriously, we shouldn't be wasting that much money going to a non-planet.

Almost.

I made my views on the Pluto-is-a-planet crowd quite clear in a redlit thread t'other day.

I made my views on the Pluto-is-a-planet crowd quite clear in a redlit thread t'other day.

I'll just leave these here.

Wonky orbits aside, most people I've talked to become much more accepting of Pluto's demotion once they're told that Pluto is smaller and lighter than Earth's own moon. They've never had a problem with Luna never being considered a planet, and they tend to be much more open to additional details / reasons after that.

dittybopper:Since Pluto is no longer a planet, NASA should turn the spacecraft around and aim it at Neptune instead.you fell for it, didn't you?Seriously, we shouldn't be wasting that much money going to a non-planet.

I made my views on the Pluto-is-a-planet crowd quite clear in a redlit thread t'other day.

I'll just leave these here.

Wonky orbits aside, most people I've talked to become much more accepting of Pluto's demotion once they're told that Pluto is smaller and lighter than Earth's own moon. They've never had a problem with Luna never being considered a planet, and they tend to be much more open to additional details / reasons after that.

Plus it makes sense because if they didn't demote Pluto recently, they would eventually have to. We're only going to find more and more KBOs of similar size, composition, and orbital characteristics. We either have 8 planets to hundreds. There's just no way to go back to 9 without having to make a weird exception for Pluto.

I made my views on the Pluto-is-a-planet crowd quite clear in a redlit thread t'other day.

I'll just leave these here.

Wonky orbits aside, most people I've talked to become much more accepting of Pluto's demotion once they're told that Pluto is smaller and lighter than Earth's own moon. They've never had a problem with Luna never being considered a planet, and they tend to be much more open to additional details / reasons after that.

Plus it makes sense because if they didn't demote Pluto recently, they would eventually have to. We're only going to find more and more KBOs of similar size, composition, and orbital characteristics. We either have 8 planets to hundreds. There's just no way to go back to 9 without having to make a weird exception for Pluto.

Or, unless they find another ice giant out beyond Pluto. There's some rumbling that there are too many KBOs out there so *something* must be shepherding them.

I made my views on the Pluto-is-a-planet crowd quite clear in a redlit thread t'other day.

I'll just leave these here.

Wonky orbits aside, most people I've talked to become much more accepting of Pluto's demotion once they're told that Pluto is smaller and lighter than Earth's own moon. They've never had a problem with Luna never being considered a planet, and they tend to be much more open to additional details / reasons after that.

Plus it makes sense because if they didn't demote Pluto recently, they would eventually have to. We're only going to find more and more KBOs of similar size, composition, and orbital characteristics. We either have 8 planets to hundreds. There's just no way to go back to 9 without having to make a weird exception for Pluto.

Or, unless they find another ice giant out beyond Pluto. There's some rumbling that there are too many KBOs out there so *something* must be shepherding them.

The Voyagers have found nothing, and it's a quite crazy idea to posit that there may be a planet in the Kuiper belt.

I don't always contact interplanetary spacecraft, but when I do, I do it with Morse code.

That explains the time frame of the QSO... :-)

Congrats!!!

I actually almost didn't do it. I was working from home and "reading the mail" on PSK31 on 20 meters that day when I saw someone mention it, so I quick looked it up, then tuned the rig up on 10 meters.

I'd just like to point out that many sane and responsible adults agreed, with straight faces and no obvious signs of inebriation, to spend years designing and fabricating something that would be launched into space and take nine years to reach its destination. And why? For the most noble reason of all: because why not?

mofa:I'd just like to point out that many sane and responsible adults agreed, with straight faces and no obvious signs of inebriation, to spend years designing and fabricating something that would be launched into space and take nine years to reach its destination. And why? For the most noble reason of all: because why not?

See, the thing is that there are 8 major bodies in the solar system that, as we currently understand, accreted from the same disc of matter. They share the same ecliptical plane, within a few degrees of eccentricity, and orbit the sun in elliptical orbits that we can explain with our knowledge of how the solar system formed.

Previous bodies that were once called planets are now recognised to be asteroids, KBOs, dwarf planets...

See, the thing is that there are 8 major bodies in the solar system that, as we currently understand, accreted from the same disc of matter. They share the same ecliptical plane, within a few degrees of eccentricity, and orbit the sun in elliptical orbits that we can explain with our knowledge of how the solar system formed.

Previous bodies that were once called planets are now recognised to be asteroids, KBOs, dwarf planets...

Should all fruit be called apples?

A persimmon may not be as big or as sweet as an apple, but that doesn't mean it isn't a fruit.

dittybopper:iron de havilland: dittybopper: Mad_Radhu: We either have 8 planets to hundreds.

I'm OK with having hundreds.

See, the thing is that there are 8 major bodies in the solar system that, as we currently understand, accreted from the same disc of matter. They share the same ecliptical plane, within a few degrees of eccentricity, and orbit the sun in elliptical orbits that we can explain with our knowledge of how the solar system formed.

Previous bodies that were once called planets are now recognised to be asteroids, KBOs, dwarf planets...

Should all fruit be called apples?

A persimmon may not be as big or as sweet as an apple, but that doesn't mean it isn't a fruit.

Yeah, that's where the analogy kind of breaks down as persimmons have more in common with other fruit than Pluto has with the 8 planets.